explore

Instagram is making it easier for users to buy the stuff they see brands post in Stories. The photo-sharing platform started testing the Shopping in Stories feature in June; as of today, it's available to businesses based in 46 countries. There's also a new Shopping channel prominently featured in Explore.

Back in July, YouTube began testing a new Explore tab on the home page of its iOS app. Not many people saw it — only about one percent of users on that platform. Apparently feedback has been positive, though, because YouTube has announced that the test is now expanding to more platforms, including Android.

You open a maps application, you expect to see a map of where you are. It's common sense, yet we have to start this news article with this pretty basic knowledge bit. The reason? Whoever is behind the latest Google Maps server-side test seems to have missed that "Map app making 101" lesson and went free-styling with their own ideas.

Long ago, before Google Now turned into the Feed, Google used to provide you with an easily accessible summary of custom tailored, account-scraped stuff, useful for keeping track of various deadlines or ongoing details. In that transition to Feed, though, the information was relegated to a new "Upcoming" tab in the Google app, and the personal overview started to stagnate a bit. Well, Google's bringing it all back better than ever via the Assistant.

In its everlasting quest to get information that matters to you, Google announced at I/O 2018 a new Assistant experience that would consolidate the stuff you care about most in a central Feed-like overview page. With a vague launch time of "this summer," we didn't have any exact timeline for the feature's launch, but just as the calendar flipped over to "summer" officially, we received one tip of the new interface going live for a reader.

Twitter shared in a blog post today that it's working on changes to its content discovery features, as well as push notifications for events and news stories the platform identifies as likely to be interesting to you. Most of the changes lack firm release dates, rolling out "in the coming weeks" and months.

Google has been pumping out significant updates pretty fast recently, likely as the finishing touches are put down on new features that will be cut loose in a couple of weeks during I/O. The latest update brings with it the 'At a glance' widget that debuted in the Pixel Launcher, making it available to many more devices and in different launchers. We've also got a few small topics to cover in a teardown.

Instagram's feed tab is probably the one in which users spend most of their time, since it's the one with pictures and videos from people and brands you actually chose to follow. The "Explore" tab, on the other hand, is meant to surface content from users you don't follow, either because it's content that's popular on Instagram or just because some algorithm decided you might like it. Honestly, it's so often littered with bad memes and overly-filtered photos that I avoid it for the most part. However, Instagram seems to be working on a redesign of the Explore tab that would seem to make it a little easier to browse, as first spotted by TechPP.

Snapchat's Snap Map, the heatmap overview of Snaps shared around the world, was introduced last summer, letting users get a better sense of where their friends were sharing from. However, unless you zoomed out and looked around for Snaps and Stories outside your area, you would likely miss out on content that hadn't been shared nearby. Today, Snap has introduced a feature called 'Explore' that will bring more prominence to content on the Snap Map, regardless of where it's shared from.